At 3 am on October 28, 1940, the Italian ambassador Emanuele Grazzi will visit the Greek prime minister and, waking him up, will deliver an ultimatum according to which Italy, in order to feel safe, demanded that it seize bases and other parts of Greek territory – whatever it deemed necessary until the end of global conflict. Ioannis Metaxas will immediately reject the ultimatum, saying: “So, c’est la guerre. Well, we have a war”. Greece is now at war with Italy, a war in which Odysseus Elytis will take part with the rank of second lieutenant, risking death from severe typhus. “At the front I fell ill with severe typhus. The water we drank wherever we found it, among the dead bodies of the mules, was polluted. Not knowing what I had, I had to spend three days and nights on foot and with the animal to find a passable road and be transported to the hospital in Ioannina. I stayed there forty days with forty fevers, motionless, with ice on my belly. They had decided me, but I had not decided myself». This is how Elytis will describe, more than twenty years later, in an interview with the student magazine “Panspudasti”, in 1962, the painful adventure of war, but also his victorious attempt to stay alive.

Elytis was discharged in April 1941, he was then in his thirties, but the fire of the Albanian front never faded from his memory. In 1945 he will publish in the magazine “Tetradio” the poetic composition “A heroic and mournful song for the lost lieutenant of Albania”which will be, as the title prepares us, the ode to the triumph of Greece in its conflict with the Italian army, but also the elegy for the pain of the fallen and for the lost youth:

Where the sun first dwelt,

Where the weather opened with the eyes of a virgin,

As the wind snowed from the shaking of the almond tree,

And on the tops of the grass they lit horsemen,

Where the hoof of a sycamore tree hit

And a flag fluttered above land and water,

Which weapon never weighed on his back

But all the toil of heaven,

The whole world shone like a drop of water

Morning at the foot of the mountain,

Now, as from God’s sigh a shadow grows,

Now, agony crouched with bony arms,

She grabs and wipes out the flowers on her one by one,

Through the ravines where the waters stopped

The songs are full of joy

Rocks monks with cold hair

They cut the bread in silence in the wilderness.

Winter enters as the mind. Something bad

It will light up. The horse’s hair grows wild,

The vultures share the crumbs of the sky high.

And how shall the gladness, the bounty of nature, and the joy of earth and heaven, give place to the threatening landscape of winter, to the coming fire of arms, and to death, which is on its way and will soon cause the ultimate crush. The prowess of the Greek army precedes, as we progress through the poem. Rigid, frozen and gunpowder-smoked warriors led by the young lieutenant, who will eventually fall dead, soulless, with his gaze looking at nowhere and the last one having departed for the ends of the world. And if the strength and courage of life managed to hold on to a last vestige and give a little more light, death will put an end to the rule of the sun and youthful vigor, banishing beauty and welcoming darkness. And all, nature of the Earth, heavenly bodies, shadows of the forest and men, will weep not only for the lieutenant but also for those who perished with him, traveling to the infinite, against the gloom, the tension, the mental youth and the once inexhaustible reserves of the lost.

But, no matter how much it hurts, no matter how much death rages, nothing and no one is finished, nothing and no one is meant to pass into oblivion and annihilation. The dead lieutenant and his swept comrades are not meant to be buried, but to nourish with the memory of their struggle all the new trunks that will sprout, even now, around them, bringing the heavenly sphere down to the hard ground, bringing the dream to the everyday life and singing how soon everything will start all over again. For everything was made for freedom and everything glorifies it:

Now the dream hits faster in the blood

The world’s most correct moment means:

Freedom.

Greeks in the dark show the way:

FREEDOM

The sun will cry for you

Iridescent solids fall into the water

Ships with open sails sail across the meadows

The most innocent girls

They run naked in the eyes of men

And modesty calls out from behind the fence

Children! There is no other land more beautiful…

The world’s most right moment means!

With step breakfast in the growing grass

Still he rises;

Now the lusts that once were glow around him

Lost in sin and loneliness;

Neighbors of his heart the desires burn;

Birds greet him, they seem like his brothers

People call out to him, they seem to be his companions

“Birds, my good birds, death ends here!”

“Comrades, my good comrades, here life begins!”

Ayazi of heavenly beauty shines in his hair

Crystal bells ring in the distance

Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow: God’s Easter!

With the “Heroic and mournful song for the lost lieutenant of Albania”, Elytis will move away from hyperrealism and from the natural magic of his youth to mix from now on in his poetry the harsh realism of history with the parallel focus on the dreamlike , the mysterious and the transcendental of the Greek cosmogony. His poetic language will further reveal the mystery of the birth of things, the sudden embrace of rational consciousness with the depth of the submission of thoughts – from here, after all, language derives its morals and ethics, from here it also draws its great temporal duration. Because language is among other things, or even primarily, poetry and because Greek poetry, from Sappho and Homer to our days, has managed to preserve intact, although in a completely different way each time, both metal and and the volume of her voice.